Dolly and Burt Reynolds graced the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal to promote the summer release of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in 1982. She openly discussed with entertainment writer Cliff Jahr the problems that plagued the production and shared her thoughts on volatile costar Reynolds. Labeling Dolly’s an “open marriage,” Jahr was one of just a handful of journalists to meet her stealthy husband Carl Dean, who just so happened to be lurking around the Whorehouse set.
In addition to her movie troubles, Dolly hinted to Jahr about a more personal kind of despair that would soon send her into the worst depression of her life. Apparently, 1981 had started with what Dolly calls here in LHJ “an affair of the heart,” not with Burt Reynolds, as the tabloids suggested, but with Gregg Perry, her band leader since the late 1970s. “Gregg and I became very close,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I had never spent so much time with such a well-educated and knowledgeable man. . . . I let myself get completely wrapped up in him.” At one point, Dolly’s attention was so focused on Perry that Judy Ogle excused herself from the entourage. Judy saw herself as the third wheel, became resentful, and soon went back to the military. She eventually returned, of course, and remains Dolly’s assistant and constant companion.
When it came time to do the music for Whorehouse, Dolly arranged for Perry to join her in the task, but the experience turned out as badly for him and it did her. “It was not a fun project for anybody involved,” she wrote in 1994. “Gregg quit altogether. He told me he couldn’t take the pressure and the B.S. of the business anymore. The joy had gone out of it for him, and I’m sure that I was no picnic to live with at that time. . . . I was crushed when he left.” The two were so close, in fact, that Dolly was inspired to write the passionate “What a Heartache” in response to Perry’s departure:
I thought I’d found a safe and lovin’ place inside your heart
And I was warm and willing anytime
The same soft lips that kissed me sweet were lyin’ from the start
But I swear I thought your love was genuine.
Dolly rarely speaks of the affair or Gregg Perry anymore, but she described the ordeal quite clearly and concisely to Vanity Fair in 1991: “It all involved a personal heartbreak—I’m not gonna call names. But it’s plain, ain’t it? It was a love.” —Ed.
Here is Dolly Parton at her most outspoken. In this revealing interview, she tells you what she thinks of the Moral Majority, Burt Reynolds, and her own open marriage. And she even introduces Carl Dean, her reclusive husband.
Mention her name and people smile. They think of a sunny little woman teetering on high heels, the hourglass figure spilling out of her dress, her pretty face framed in a cloud of wiggy blondness made radiant by a smile that sometimes appears sweet, and sometimes sassy.
Dolly Parton at times resembles Mae West, Daisy Mae, Madame Du Barry, two Marilyn Monroes—and every mistress of ceremonies who ever worked in burlesque. Yet, she is an original, and, to intimate friends, the woman inside is even more complex than her evocative image. This complexity was heightened during the recent filming of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, in which she co-stars with Burt Reynolds. Making the movie, Dolly claims she faced “more problems, sorrows and enlightenment” than ever before in her life.
Nothing about the making of Whorehouse, to be released this month, came easy. Two directors were fired, one set was pulled down and rebuilt and in all the movie took three years to complete. Coming on top of personal problems, the film made for Dolly’s roughest year ever. “On the movie, we’ve gone through so much bitterness,” she says, “tension, quarrels, hurt feelings. I threatened to quit so many times. Oh, I don’t ever want to work that hard again. Or need to. There is a tiny voice in me that keeps saying, ‘This is the last movie that you will ever make.’”
Burt Reynolds was finishing his last two days of work on the film when I arrived. Everyone seemed to heave a sigh of relief as he departed, for Reynolds had grown difficult. America’s No. 1 male box-office star was under the gun after three of his movies in a row grossed less than expected—and a fourth looked shaky. But also, he knew what people at the studio were saying—that Dolly’s irresistible glow would walk off with the picture. She plays Miss Mona, a brothel madam with a heart of gold. When the role was offered to Dolly, she knew she was born to play it. Nonetheless, she accepted only after some prayer and soul-searching because of her concern about the film’s frankness.
“I am not trying to glorify prostitution,” says Dolly, “but if I do, may God forgive me. Not everyone is so lucky as me to get a chance to portray a whore instead of having to be one. But I kinda wanted to make a statement with this picture. It points a finger at a lot of people, and some of ’em ain’t whores. Like people who get fake religion. It’s a shame the title sounds so risqué because certain people in the Moral Majority who should see it may be turned off.
“There are many wonderful people in this world,” Dolly continues softly, “but there are many more people who just think they’re wonderful. In fact, they are self-righteous hypocrites, sinners because they commit crimes like judging thy neighbor. The truly religious forgive. I have been judged a bad woman by some of these people just because I am too open and free and honest.
“Prostitutes, I will tell you, are some of the sweetest, most caring people I’ve known because they’ve been through everything. I’ve met them at parties, and I’ve talked with them. Usually they’re people with broken dreams who never had a chance in life or were sexually abused or ignored as children. A lot sell themselves to get some kind of feeling of being loved. The movie will show these women have feelings. You’re gonna cry your eyes out.”
Dolly’s own story would make quite a movie as well. A former country music queen, she leaped overnight to national attention some five years ago with a hit recording (“Here You Come Again”) and with her television appearances with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Then she scored an enormous hit in her first movie, when she outshone her more experienced co-stars, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, in Nine to Five. In fact, she was probably the main reason for the movie’s immense $120-million gross.
Her origins recall the Appalachian poverty of another country music queen, Loretta Lynn, of Coal Miner’s Daughter fame. Dolly was born the fourth of twelve children to a poor, proud farmer and his wife who lived in a two-bedroom log cabin that had no electricity. The house was nestled by the Little Pigeon River near the town of Sevierville in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
“In a big country family,” she says, “you’re just brought up by the hair of the head. You do what you got to. I—believe it or not—was a tomboy. I could climb a tree or wrestle or run as fast as any brother. We faced starvation, but Mama and Daddy taught values you don’t learn in schoolrooms—God, nature, how to care for other people and for the land, how to trust people and when not to. In a way, I’m still that little stringy-headed girl who ran around barefoot, sores on her legs, fever blisters, no clothes, who dreamed of being someone special someday.”
By guitar picking, she discovered early on her talent for music. At age ten, her singing and songwriting led to local television appearances and, by age twelve, to a debut at the Grand Ole Opry. And she proudly admits that the way she looks today owes a lot to prostitutes she first saw as a child. “I always liked the look of our hookers back home. Their big hairdos and makeup made them look more. When people say that less is more, I say more is more. Less is less. I go for more.”
Therefore, Dolly built overstatement into what she calls her “gimmick,” that is, looking trashily sexy on the surface while being sweet, warm and down-to-earth on the inside. “I look one way and am another,” she agrees. “It makes for a good combination. I always think of ‘her,’ the Dolly image, like a ventriloquist does his dummy. I have fun with it. I think, what will I do with her this year to surprise people? What’ll she wear? What’ll she say?”
Dolly and I have now settled over a fireside dinner in the living room of her Hollywood-hotel bungalow. Painted birds fly across its vaulted ceiling and a jogging trampoline stands sadly in one corner (“I don’t even go near it”). This is her “magic suite” where for three years she has written songs, screenplays, poetry and a novel in progress called Wildflowers. Unseen, her husband, Carl Dean, a man of Howard Hughesian shyness, is by himself in the far bedroom wing downing a steak. “The Doralee role in Nine to Five was not great,” Dolly continues, “but she was fine for Dolly’s first role. She could kinda sneak in as a little old fat secretary, cute and lovable and fun. But Miss Mona in Whorehouse is the epitome of everything I’ve tried to create with this image, so I may not have a need for it after the movie comes out. Maybe I’ll totally change Dolly’s look to surprise people.”
She pushes away dinner and begins to tug at her wig. Some of her own blond strands are peeking out. “You know,” she sighs, “I’m careful never to get caught up in the Dolly image, other than to develop and protect it, because if you start believing the public persona is you, you get frustrated and mixed up. Like, I suppose I am a sex symbol, but that idea is funny to me because I see Dolly as a cartoon. She’s fat, wears a wig and so on. Oh, sure, I feel sexy, and to some people I come across as extremely sexy, but Dolly’s as big a joke to me as she is to others.”
And few jokes make her laugh harder. Last October she and three friends joined the outrageous costume parade of street people that gathers on Hollywood’s Santa Monica Boulevard each Halloween. In the crowd were several women (and men) in Parton look-alike costumes, but none recognized the Real Thing prancing among them, disguised to look like a pregnant hillbilly. “Lordy, was I ugly!” Dolly gasps. “A pillow in my stomach, teeth blacked out, Sores and bruises and chigger bites painted all over. I’d go up to the others and gasp, ‘Are you really Dolly Parton?’ and they’d holler ‘Oh, honey, of course! Who else?’ And we’d fall down laughing. I thought to myself, ‘God, if they only knew who I was and how ugly I can look!’”
She remembers something and grins slyly. “My husband Carl always said to me, ‘Angel Cakes, you know why you are just so beautiful to me? It’s the way you make yourself more than what you actually are. Because you just lack about a half-a-inch of being ugly as hell.’” Dolly squeals with laughter.
Clearly, Dolly doesn’t take herself or her image too seriously—unlike her co-star, some say. Insiders moan about Burt Reynolds’s odd behavior during Whorehouse, complaining that he’s starting to believe his image—stepping on people, blowing up and making snarling demands. “The difference between Dolly and Burt,” chuckles one executive, “is that when Dolly goes home at night and takes off her wig, she knows she’s still just Dolly Parton. But when Burt goes home and takes his off, he doesn’t know who he is.”
Dolly won’t criticize her co-star, though she admits there were “sensitive times when things were said—not meaning to—that brought tears to his or my eyes. He’s had a very hard time,” she explains. “His broken heart with Sally Field, broken plans, working too hard, all those things can cause him to overreact in a lot of situations, especially being as sensitive as he is. But I do believe that inside him there’s a wonderful, wonderful man. And I think we have screen magic.”
What they had off-screen was “even sweeter than a love affair,” she declares. But there was talk at one point that their relationship was exactly that sweet. Burt reportedly spent several nights with Dolly during her Las Vegas debut. She is not talking. “I ain’t saying yea or nay,” she drawls, holding back a grin, and repeats, “Just sweeter than a love affair.”
However, other stories were clearly over-eager tabloid nonsense, such as the report that Burt sneaked Dolly off by private jet for a cozy weekend at his house in Florida. “What they didn’t print,” Dolly giggles, “is that Burt also brought along Jim Nabors and several cast members.”
But Dolly’s life recently hasn’t been all weekends with handsome Burt. In fact, she has noticed the pattern of a “major turnaround” in her life every seven years. In 1974, for instance, came the wrenching split from Porter Wagoner, the country star who discovered her; and in 1981—the year she turned 35—she says she “suffered more, experienced more and realized more than ever in my entire life.
“My heart was shattered in the beginning of the year, not by a romance, but by an ‘affair of the heart.’ And it about killed me.”
Dolly won’t elaborate. “I do have a right to some secret spots,” she counters. “Then also last year my throat was bad, I was trying to write, there were lots of family problems, and this came on top of all the movie’s putdowns and dragouts and misunderstandings. Suddenly, six months into the year, everything switched, cleared up and turned into a year of enlightenment. It will happen again, I’m sure, in seven years, when I’m forty-two.”
It is sometimes surprising to confront the serious side of Dolly Parton. But she can be serious. Last September, for example, during a break in filming, she vanished for five days on an odyssey to nowhere in what proved to be for her a religious experience. Accompanied by Judy Ogle, her longtime aide and confidante (they played snare drums in the Sevierville High School band), the two drove the back-roads north in a rented station wagon, finally ending up in the wine country above San Francisco.
“Dolly didn’t come along,” she winks. “No wig, no makeup—and only three people recognized me because I smiled or talked. That always gives me away. I planned to hike and write songs, but midway we fell into these heavy conversations and I got caught up in a spiritual awakening that was joyful and real. I felt so close to God that I expected to see a revelation. I thought if I could just go around that next bend in the road, there’s an answer. Oh, I wanted to keep going, and when I had to come back to work, I cried. I learned more things in those five days because it was like before I got to be a star. And I thought, well, I’m not going to miss this anymore by getting caught up living in a mansion. I’m going to fix me a van—a dream machine—and do more of this. I’m also going to buy some property far away from everything where I can write and read. It’ll be my Garden of Eden, closer to God.”
Seeming somewhat apart from Dolly’s ups and downs is her husband of seventeen years, Carl Dean. Dean has become to her fans an intriguing shadow figure, always the mystery man in the other room. He never speaks to reporters, and has been photographed only once, five years ago, when a spy cameraman caught him speeding away in a truck. Yet, the next day, when I am on the set, I am surprised when Dolly sidles up to me and says, “C’mon, you gotta meet Carl.”
Nobody much notices the good-looking guy in plaid shirt and buckskin boots who sits nonchalantly on the set, on the whorehouse’s front porch. He has big rough hands and soft brown eyes and no one can miss what Dolly must see in him. His fine features and short chestnut hair combine with about six feet three inches of sinewy muscle to project, at age 38, an image of sexy boyishness. His well-lined skin is a result, no doubt, of so many hours working in the sun. He often visits, unrecognized like this, “just to do nothin’,” when Dolly is working away from home for long periods, in this case, a nine-week absence. No longer an asphalt contractor, he still “hoists and hauls,” especially in the running of their big house near Nashville.
He prefers anonymity because he has “no ambitions in show business. Soon as you pose for ‘just one picture,’ well, how do you say no to the next?” Shucks, he wasn’t upset by the spy photographer. “The guy was just doing his job,” laughs Carl, “and I was doing mine.”
He’s an easy talker, charming and droll, quick to ask your opinions and ready to share his, among them a fondness for certain rock groups, James Michener’s Centennial (“The greatest book I’ve ever read”) and Mick Jagger (“Now he’s something else again”). Carl also has an eye for handsome women. As one leggy showgirl sways by, he remarks, “That could make a person nervous.”
It is clear that he loves “Mama” (meaning Dolly), and vice versa, despite what is often rumored in the tabloids about the “openness” of their marriage. Among friends and associates, they are even open about the openness. Carl doesn’t hide his half-serious flirting with showgirls, while Dolly lightly kids about it, even eggs him on. Anyway, she likes to mimic Daisy Mae flirtations with the guys herself—mostly for laughs. After all these years of a two-career marriage they seem a happy example of the adage that the tightest hold on someone is with an open hand.
For years the press has printed divorce rumors, most recently in February of this year after Carl did not join her on an Australian Christmas trip. She was accompanied instead by her manager Sandy Gallin, who shares a New York Fifth Avenue apartment with Dolly. Their relationship, while close, is strictly business-platonic, no matter what you may read.
On the Christmas trip, star and manager were shopping for real estate by viewing land from an airplane. Dolly wanted waterfront acreage for a Down Under hideaway, but she was mobbed everywhere by friendly Aussies, and has switched her hideaway plans to Hawaii. In fact, she cut the Australian trip short, due in part to a gynecological problem that required emergency surgery in Los Angeles and an indefinite delay of her appearance in Las Vegas. (She earns that town’s top wage, $350,000 a week.)
“Carl ’n’ I are good friends,” explains Dolly. “We have a real special relationship, and they’ll have to wait a long, long time for our divorce. We’re so totally open and free that whatever happens, happens. Carl was the wittiest boy in school. He’s a fool like Steve Martin, yet there’s that depth. He’s so brilliant and sensitive and good. We’ve never had a serious argument. Oh, we get a little aggravated like any couple. The hardest time was when we built our house: Carl, I don’t like that faucet. Well, then why don’t you do it yourself?”
She covers her mouth and grimaces. “It makes him fee-urious when I call him Carl. I always call him Daddy and he calls me Mama or Little Kid or Angel Cakes. Sometimes he calls me Dotty to be silly: ‘Okay, Li’l Dotty.’ Maybe once a year I call him Carl and it seems so cold that it really upsets him. Then he gets back by calling me Dolly, which cuts me to the quick.” She waves away the thought.
“Built the way I am, I’ve always been fascinated with tall, skinny men; no big muscles, no hair on their chest. Carl has the smoothest skin and not an ounce of fat on his body. When we first got married, I always tried to get him into those sexy little see-through, mesh underpants. But he wouldn’t wear them. Finally my feelings got hurt, so he put ’em on. By pure coincidence, there’s a scene in Whorehouse like that. Burt wears boxer shorts, and I go buy him sexy briefs, and he don’t want to wear ’em. You can see why I was really good in that scene.
“Carl also buys me sexy underwear, and for some reason, he loves me in hot pants, especially when I lose weight. He’ll say, ‘Now go put on them hot pants, cuz you probably ain’t going to lose any more weight.’ I’ll say, ‘Daddy, I don’t think I’ll look so hot in those hot pants, but okay.’”
Though they may be “Daddy” and “Mama” to each other, the Deans decided against having children, partly because they helped raise so many relations to whom they are known as Aunt Granny and Uncle Pee Paw. They have a big, white-columned plantation house, an exact copy of Tara in Gone with the Wind, which stands unseen behind high gates on sixty-five wooded acres. Furnished “real gorgeous” by a top Los Angeles decorator, their work areas are in separate wings, with a decor accent on durability. His rustic den has hardwood floors to repel an outdoorsman’s muddy boots, and Dolly’s blue and gold music room is finished in washable fabrics because, “When I write songs, I live over there, and I want to be able to spill Kool-Aid or Jell-O or peanut butter. It’s real plush, though. When you pull the curtains up, they’re all puffy. Of course,” she adds, “our bedroom belongs to both of us.” Preferring privacy, they mostly do their own housework, being thereby free to run naked between hot tub, swimming pool and a small private lake. That’s about the extent of Dolly’s exercising, though she will briefly fast or occasionally diet to get her weight down. “I look better fat, though, don’t you think? Skinny, my face looks too long. I’m just very hefty. People are always telling me to lose weight, but being overweight has certainly never made me less money or hurt my career. And doctors always say I got the best blood they ever seen. Besides, everybody loves a fat girl.”
A smile lights up her face. “See, I know I’m not a natural beauty. I got short legs, short hands and a tiny frame, but I like the way I am. I am me. I am real. I am Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean.”
DOLLY DIAMOND
On Dollywood
“I have an idea that I’ve had for years that’s beginning to become a reality. There’s a place in East Tennessee called Gatlinburg, in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which is one of the biggest tourist areas in the United States, and I happened to have been born and raised in that part of the country. And there will be a new park—a new city, actually—called Dollywood USA, and it’s like a mountain fantasy, like Disneyland, only it will be in the Smoky Mountains. I would say that within three to five years that it will be a big, big park. We’ll have a golf course, I’m gonna have a race track, we’ll have all the fantasy things. It’s a major dream of mine . . . very similar in nature to Disneyland, only there will be many, many other things: canoeing, horseback ridin’, campin’ out, and actually, sort of a southern way of life, a combination of all the wonderful things of this world that people look for.”
—To Terry Wogan, March 1983